Big Therapy Project, Week Seven: Let’s Be Hospitable to Anger

Last weekend was tough. After telling the story twice this time to the therapist, I was so immobile as to temporarily be unable to move my hand across the page. I was scared, jangled, and raw, and I got thoroughly convinced that she would never be back again, that she would abandon me and I’d be stuck in that surly, raw state forever. Of course she didn’t; by the end of the weekend I had two appointments, but the feeling that she was gone was no less real.

So guess what triggers me now: meditation. Are you kidding me with this? Sunday morning, I went with Gold Star Winggirl to try out the mindfulness group at church. I sat for a full twenty minutes (usually I average about five) and it was lovely—there was an emphatic robin trilling outside and rain on the window panes.

But then the fucking people started to talk. They talked about not being disciplined enough in their mindfulness, which strikes me as not just a first world problem, but a made up one at that—really?! Not enough of our lives are controlled, we have to make up ways to police our thoughts, too?

Then the woman to the right of me (I was secretly thinking of her as the Ignorant White Lady, since the week before we overheard her tell the anti-mass-incarceration speaker that she’d never heard of such a problem.) said that mindfulness helps her because sometimes she has feelings that she mistakes for anger when they’re really just vulnerability or pain. Others talked about mindfulness as a way to slow down their knee-jerk reactions. All of those things are reasonable to say, but they filled me with fury. I piped up (nicely) in favor of feeling all of our emotions and heeding our knee-jerk reactions sometimes.

Nothing bad happened at all, but after I piped up I felt like I’d gotten in trouble for something. I was terribly frightened, angry and nauseous. Maybe it was just that we were in a circle taking turns talking just like when we were being questioned by the police in the end of the Bad Thing story, or maybe it’s just what mindfulness brought. By the time we were taking a short second meditation, I was fully upset and wanted to run out, but stayed put so I didn’t disturb anyone’s peace.

I apologized to GSW for “letting her down.” That’s how it feels when I can’t adjust to things, when I can’t fit in. A lot of the time lately, I feel like I’m failing at some basic and easy human thing. I envy her her ability to mingle in groups, to take them or leave them instead of always feeling under attack. This fear of groups is something I’ve always had, but it’s getting worse and worse as the Bad Thing fights to leave my system.

In a touching and odd demonstration of friendship, GSW snuck her church coffee cup into her purse—I’ve never seen petty theft act as a gesture of solidarity before, but it worked. We skipped the regular church service in favor of catching up in a café, but I never did shake the feeling of having failed her, of being disconnected, and I “knew” she’d be gone like all the other friends.

Though I didn’t speak angrily in the meditation group, I felt saturated and poisoned by anger there, and strangely this is probably a good thing. Each time I tell the Bad Thing story and get to the rape part, I can’t address the anger I feel, it’s too vast. Perversely, I try to tell it as nicely and charmingly as possible so I don’t scare the therapist or get in trouble. I guess I’m glad the anger is coming out, even if it is in vexing circumstances.

Even if I do weirdly try to be sweet when I tell it, it is the nastiest and deepest anger. The closest I’ve come to actually expressing it was during the Scary Party fiasco, and though at that time I felt like I would drown in it, I was still coming at the real issue sideways. I want to look directly at the anger: I’m pissed off two decades later that someone was inside me unwanted, that I was too robotlike to fight and kick, that I was used in such a senseless and pleasureless way, and especially that the experience stayed there in my hoo-ha, a minefield waiting there for any man kind enough to fuck me. That someone so vile and thoughtless could inhabit part of my body for so long makes me frustrated and livid. I’m angry that I may never have a real relationship with a man, that PIV sex may never feel safe and normal, that I never found a way to get the experience out of my body before now.

I think I’d like to make friends with the anger that I was so move to defend in mindfulness class. Instead of being scared and ashamed and letting it make me feel like a monster, I want to embrace it. I’m angry. I’ve always been angry. It’s one of the emotions that humans have and it happens to be one that often motivates real change. Anger deserves just as much care and love and therapy hours as sadness does, maybe in this case, more.

All those years ago and since, I was so overwhelmed and terrified and ashamed by the anger that the Bad Story brought that the only way I thought I could protect myself and others from it was to turn it inwards, where it lived as self-hate and sadness. But, as we’ve seen from all of my various reenactments, it’s only making me angrier that way. If I can welcome it, make it safe, and draw it out, maybe the anger will release me and make way for other emotions, for the next adventures.

Big Therapy Project, Week Five: Walking a Tightrope

I was gonna take a blog break for the privacy, but that felt too isolating and plus I need the creative outlet. I guess I just have to trust you to know I won’t always be as bleak as these weeks are.

The big challenge lately is the way that the Big Therapy Project has been making my work life tricky. As of right now, I haven’t been assigned a grade next year because the principal has some hesitations about me. It’s my first full school year as a teacher and she doesn’t feel like I’m progressing as quickly as I should in some areas and thinks (as will come as a surprise to exactly no one who reads this blog) that I can be too defensive sometimes. I wish I were learning quicker and I’m not defensive about my defensiveness, but it’s kind of hard going in every morning, knowing that I might have to let the place go.

It’s a hard job in a tough school, there may be someplace more hospitable and less triggering, where I could learn and grow faster, and now that I’m breaking myself of the habit of trying to prove that I’m a good person through sacrifice (now that I know I’m not a masochist) I don’t need to do the hardest job. I don’t like feeling that I’ve failed there, or that the next mistake might be the one to make her feel like I don’t belong. I’m really sad about all of my failures as a teacher, but also about how much time and energy it takes and how many of my actual talents aren’t usable there.

Life just feels like it’s so much about loss and futility and shame at work, and the Big Therapy Project, the one awesome thing that I am unequivocally accomplishing right now, is making the tightrope I’m walking at work a little harder. On one hand, a new sense of autonomy and groundedness is emerging, but on the other having The Bad Thing story so close to the surface often makes me want to scream at everybody to get away from me—I don’t, but I know I can often come across as anxious, and yes, defensive.

One of the major things I’m confronting about The Bad Thing is that it wasn’t my fault. All these years, I’ve been telling myself I chose my rapist, I’ve been beating myself up for the illusion that I somehow could have protected myself from what happened. But whether I was drunk or drugged, I was in no position to consent, and I didn’t. I lost my autonomy in that moment and I’ve long wanted to make sure that never happen again, giving me an inflated sense of everyday humiliations, a need to protect some imagined dignity. As I really come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t a choice, a new sense of being indignant marked IT WASN’T MY FAULT is starting to come out.

But the thing is, teaching means being held responsible for ALL KINDS of things that aren’t my fault: the child who has nine brothers and sisters and is so starved for attention that he disrupts or leaves class and often feels like he might eat me alive, the overworked special ed teacher who snaps at the grade team because her caseload is so overwhelming, the autistic child whose parents refuse to get him services, the child who is just now entering school in third grade and can’t read at all, all of those issues, along with the general awfulness of poverty violence and inequality, are things I can’t change, and they are all things that will effect my evaluations—that’s how the system is set up right now—fewer and fewer resources and more and more strict ways to judge teachers.

So the whole defensiveness thing kind of feels like a catch 22. I want to take responsibility for the things I can change and tell people to fuck off about the rest. I think that’s ultimately how I’ll be able to forgive myself if I end up getting let go. I made mistakes in a hard job, I did my best, but ultimately I can’t control if I’m a fit.

Anyway, in the course of feeling like I have to fight people off, (A character flaw that I’ve always had and which the Bad Thing exacerbated) I’ve had bouts of being very fearful and angry toward men, especially if they seem to be attracted to me. I asked the therapist about this and she said that it would probably get worse before it gets better.

My point is that two of the things I’ve found the most meaning in, my job and my body adventures, are kind of out of reach as sources for fulfillment for a while, and the work of the Big Therapy Project is slow and painstaking. Each appointment, (every two week) I tell the Bad Thing story again, sink a little deeper into it each time, and I can feel it leaving my body little by little. I take a lot of comfort in writing to/with my teenage self—I always sleep soundly afterwards and sometimes I wake up feeling like I’ve just done yoga, even though I didn’t.

I’m accomplishing something I’ve wanted to do for 20 years, but right now it’s hard to see the good sometimes. About eleven years ago, I quit smoking, and this is a very similar feeling—I stayed a way from people a lot because I was afraid I would yell at them, I felt sad all the time, I took a little too much comfort in sugar. I felt separated from the good parts of my personality for years. This is an even more loving thing than quitting smoking, I just hope it doesn’t do too much damage to my life in the process.

The therapist said to list all of the ways that loss relates to my current situation and to the Bad Thing, but every time I think about that list, I feel how big it is and I don’t know where I even could start listing. I feel blinded by it. I lost 20 years of feeling safe with men; maybe I’ll never get to feel that. I may be losing my job and all the things I love about it. I’ve lost so much of my life with Sweetie and I really don’t know which parts are okay to keep. I’ve lost so many friends from adventures gone wrong. It seems like I gave myself faith in the Mystery Family just so I could lose that faith. Dating has a necessary component of loss that I can’t handle right now, so thank goodness I’ve let that go.

How I’m dealing with it is that I’m doing my best. I’m chanting every day, taking long walks, eating lots of produce, hanging out with cute neighbor friends. Church and brunch afterwards have become my big social occasions. For all the loss, I’m free of the feeling that I’m slipping through the cracks—turning my attention to my teenage self is what I’ve been trying to convince myself to do all these years, and now I have. Sometimes it means staying home from something fun because I’m grumpy or panicky, but it also means taking responsibility for myself and settling into my own skin like I never have before. I’m doing my best. I hope I can see myself shining on the other side of it before too long.

One Year After the Scary Party: Better, Stronger, Still Pissed

You can read the Scary Party story here.

It’s funny that the only place it felt safe to sit and write this in my notebook was the Whole Foods where Sweetie and I had some of our last dates. I guess it makes a certain amount of sense to process trauma in the same place where I get my hopefully-less-cruel meats.

Ever since the ads started popping up around town for the local horticulture society’s annual flower show, the one I made Sweetie miss last year because I was too upset from the Scary Party (I still wish I could make it up to her somehow) I’ve been thinking about how I can piece that story together with everything that’s happened since.

I never forgave them, but I’ve accepted the fact that somewhere in the city, every second Saturday of the month, there’s an event where the head of security is a predator, where the entire team leapt to defend him and trash me because I was an outsider and a submissive who dared to want a say, where the mean kids happily have their nastiness rewarded with popularity and love. Basically, it’s high school with more interesting outfits and better-organized bullying.

I’ve always believed, entirely too much actually, that if I’m not part of the solution then I’m part of the problem. (This is how a desire to fight racism led me to a job in an inner-city school that frequently saps my strength and my soul. Not ever sure it’s the best strategy.) but I no longer feel guilty that I wasn’t able to change the corruption of the Scary Party, that they’re still walking around seeing outsiders as prey, seeing the players as their own personal buffet no matter what compromising position they’re in. It does make me angry that people I considered friends still attend and love the Scary party and what makes me EXTRA mad is that I couldn’t find a way to compromise with it, settle for it, make it all into a good time somehow. I feel that way about a lot of the things I’m leaving behind—I envy the women who have figured out how to be the right nothing to turn all of that pain into something fun and good. I couldn’t. For all that I know it’s a bad place, there’s still the primal sadness of being left out.

At the time, when everybody was slut-shaming and victim-blaming me on all those threads, I told myself that I kept one woman from going through what I went through, it would have been worth it. I didn’t find out until August, but one lovely friend of mine did see what I wrote and decided to opt out of that party. She’s very pretty and nice and I’m glad if I might have spared her some ugliness and fear.

On the other hand, trying to exact change at one party, keeping one nice girl away, seems almost pointless when the overall problem is so pernicious, both to me and out in the world at large.

Since the Bad Thing in high school, I don’t know how to approach any group of people without deep fear and mistrust, and I also don’t know how to stop loving people who are terrifying and untrustworthy, seemingly as a way to prove and re-prove my suspicions about the world. The Scary Party was a particularly vivid and irresponsible reenactment of the Bad Thing, and I know I keep acting it out as an attempt to fix it. Right now it’s sometimes hard to see the difference between working it out in therapy and the various re-traumas I’ve walked into, except that I’m facing all the fears with pants on, and with someone I know and trust very well. Hopefully that will make all the difference and I’ll see an end to this cycle before too long.

Since I began my adventures a couple of years ago, I’ve always wondered if BDSM was just a prettier and more quasi-empowered form of rape culture, and the answer is (SOMETIMES) emphatically yes. I HATED it when Sweetie would equate D/s to sexism and oppression and (given an actual, humanized power exchange) it doesn’t have to be. But just as with poly or with anything really, the stories we tell ourselves about what we’re doing, about negotiation and respect and mutual fulfillment, are not aligned with what is actually happening most of the time.

What upsets me the most about our local BDSM culture is how much horribleness people are willing to accept or just dismiss as “drama.” Last week I found out that a friend who hosted one of my favorite party series has a girlfriend who is on the Megan’s Law registry for child pornography. Child pornography! and the guy apparently feels fine about having her in his house. And I thought snuggling with an accused rapist was a big risk. It is absolutely both crazy and unsurprising in a community wherein people regularly engage in adult/child roleplay and men so EASILY admit to rape fantasies. I came in accepting and open-minded, but let me just come out and say that BDSM seems to make people think they have license to just go ahead and act like complete fucking creeps. I think we all have dark parts of ourselves that are not meant to be nourished and expressed. Sorry Brene Brown, but yes, I think people need a little more shame sometimes.

Aside from the not-okayness of the Man and his cohort, the thing that still sticks with me, the humiliation that hurts the most, is how much I liked him, how much I was fooled into thinking he liked me, how much I wanted to please him, how I clung to him for comfort after he treated me with so much contempt, how I was willing to give him a chance to try again. That’s what kept the (stupid, ignorant, sexist) management from believing what happened and what almost kept me from walking out of the situation with even one shred of pride.

In the end, it’s not how much the Scary Party disregarded me as a human being or how much the local kinky internet community thought I deserved to get fucked over, it’s how much I must’ve thought I deserved it. He gave off an I-don’t-care-about-your-limits vibe from one of the very earliest text conversations and I still let him put handcuffs on me, and worse, I still let him into my heart. I’m so empty and lonely and self-hating that it seems I’ll let anyone in, and that’s the void I am finally trying to address, to heal.

Even if I have to leave behind the hope of being part of a kink community, (there’s no telling where I’ll end up after the Big Therapy Project) the fact remains that I still get a great deal of satisfaction from submitting and without someone to serve, I still feel a deep loss. I’m not sure how those urges will find expression, but I hope that they will become part of a whole, integrated person, not someone willing to throw herself under every bus of a guy that comes along.

The flower show is the perfect regret: I never again want to miss something beautiful, genuine, and fleeting because I’m broken by something essentially meaningless. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I do (almost always) know that I exist and hope that I will love myself someday and that I will find a way to be free.

Big Therapy Project, Week Three: Four Very Creepy Words

Even though I’m walking around most days feeling like I have a low-grade emotional flu, it dawns on me sometimes that I’m doing something I’ve wished I could do for two decades—change my relationship to The Bad Thing, get it out of my body, move myself toward a life where I’m not hard, harsh and on the defensive quite so often. I love the idea that that one night when I was sixteen will stop leading me back to itself and crushing me in new and ever more creative ways. It feels like this is the ultimate body adventure and a big part of the point of this story.

Confronting the Bad Thing is a surprisingly physical experience and it’s hard to predict whether I feel warm and open or anxious and coiled up from day to day. It’s hard to imagine whether I might ever be a sex blogger again. For the past few weeks, my sex drive has been superwonky. I still have personal time, of course, but sometimes I’m rattled and upset afterwards, or just restless and vigilant. A couple of times I’ve gotten hives on my thighs or gotten strong urges to find a way to numb myself, especially after anything penetrating.

It seems like as good a time as any to admit that, with some exceptions, penis in vagina sex has been at least a little bit triggering each time I’ve had it in the past few years. As much as I enjoy it, it stirs up a deep anxiety that either leads to too-quick love and clinging or to fleeing, sometimes both at once. It’s sad that something I crave so much could have so much pain attached, and that’s something I hope to at least partly heal. For love and sex not to live so closely with paralyzing fear anymore, that seems like a worthy goal.

This appointment, she had me close my eyes (scary) and go through the story again. I sank further into the story this time, let myself feel where it lives in my body. I realized how much of that night was about not being able to move, that trapped and nauseous feeling. I came close to feeling the sickening humiliation of there being a penis inside me that I didn’t want there, a man on top of me that I was forced to choose. I can no longer pretend that I had any say there, that the sex part was anything like my fault. Even if I had not been drugged, I don’t feel in those moments any sense of agency, any power to consent. I was forced to have sex with him for the twisted amusement of the party, and nobody seems to have even had any fun.

After I told the story and was relieved to have my eyes open again, the therapist gave me the list of words and told me to work through them in whatever way I could. After she left, having high-fived me for our accomplishments, immobilized is exactly what I felt. I got into bed and didn’t/couldn’t get up for at least three or four hours. I hadn’t been to the grocery store yet and I came really close to asking Sweetie to go to the store for me. But I eventually got up and got there.

So immobilized is the one I started with and I immediately recognized its stultifying, sabotaging influence in my life. Even what drove me crazy about Sweetie is what I often described as her “inertia” but oh, how immovable I am on the inside. Part of me, since that long-ago night, has been sitting against the wall on that party’s kitchen floor, unable to get up and get myself away someplace safe. The more I acknowledge its influence, the stronger it feels, like a vice of drugged fear, holding my whole self down. I’ve visited that feeling so often in the past few years, and each time it’s both a horror and a relief.

If my teenage self is stuck on that floor in that kitchen, all I can do is offer my love and support, to tell her that I and all of the people in this story so far (well, the ones she likes, anyway, which is most of them) are there and ready to help, ready to take her hand and help her up and out the door. I know I can’t rescue her or make any cute boys rescue her, I know it all happens no matter what, but I do want her to know how much she is loved, especially by me, and maybe that will take us forward, really forward and not just to the next void.

Big Therapy Project, Week One: Telling the Bad Story

***If you get triggered by images of sexual assault, definitely skip this series. Plenty of kittens and snuggles to come, I promise. ***

This past Sunday, my therapist helped me to begin the process of confronting the teenage trauma that’s unfortunately one of the defining factors in my psyche, in the hopes of making it perhaps less so. After I told her the story, she tasked me with starting a dialogue with my sixteen-year-old self, with the goal of reaching some kind of…forgiveness isn’t the right word…acceptance, understanding, amends? Maybe embrace. Last night after I wrote the story on paper and put it in the Box of Things to Be Worked Out Later By Unseen Forces (What, you don’t have one?), I actually could feel my young self, ragged and feral, holding onto me for dear life. Maybe I can write her to safety, since I couldn’t fight our way there.

It’s possible that such a process might repair some of the holes inside me, break down the walls of anger, defensiveness, and detachment that come between me and self-love.

Before I can start the dialogue with the girl (Let’s call her S.) I have to tell you what happened. I’ve written it here before but I think it’s important to tell it from where I am now, from a place of processing rather than panic. There are many echoes of the story in the present-day one—sometimes I’m very proud of the ways I’ve relived and rewritten it, how I came from a place of helplessness and shame and somehow became a person who wins at parties, gets rescued by the Cutest Boy, who smacked the shit out of the guy who put an unwanted hand over my mouth before I figured out I liked it. But before all that, there was this. If you read it, thank you in advance—you’re easing the project along and easing the burden.

One spring when I was in high school, my body woke up and made me antsy. Because I didn’t count myself among those who could have relationships, I opted for quick and anonymous sex with any good-looking man I could get my hands on. The basketball court, conveniently located in the park three doors down, was an easy place to pick them up, and I still kind of envy myself the ease with which I took them home, fucked them, and sent them on their way.

I’m not introducing the story of the trauma with the fact that I was slutty in order to suggest any cause and effect relationship (though I admit, for years I did) only to give you an idea of what people thought I was, what I kind of thought I was for in a situation where it might’ve been helpful to see myself any other way.

My best friend told me that her boyfriend had a friend who’d fuck me, so we set it up for a Saturday night. We did the classic thing of telling each other’s mom’s we were staying at another friend’s house and went to meet the guys. They picked us up at the grocery store, of all places.

They took us to a park on the outskirts of town. My friend stayed in the car with her guy and me and the friend hiked up a big hill that overlooked the lights of our suburban town—I wanted to leave on my glasses to enjoy the view, but he didn’t like the way I looked in them, didn’t really like the way I looked at all, I don’t think, but he fucked me anyway, doggie style, maybe so he wouldn’t see my face. I enjoyed letting out yowls that echoed through the hills, felt both pleasured and degraded, mostly kind of coldly successful at life.

When the guys were all done with us, it was only 12:30 and we’d told our parents we were at Kristi’s house so we really didn’t have anyplace to go. We sat in the little park by my house, thinking about falling asleep on a park bench, when a pickup full of whooping partiers stopped to see if we wanted to join them.

I felt absolutely no hesitation, enjoying the idea of how horrified my mom would be if she knew I was riding in the back of a pickup. They drove us to a nice, neat apartment complex with “green” in the name.

I can’t say for sure that I was drugged, but I do know I was way more drunk than the number of beers I had. They were drinking some Cisco and could have slipped that in, too. We were sitting around playing quarters and I was barely able to sit up when the ugliest, most snaggle-toothed of the men said “So, which one of us are you gonna fuck?”

I said nobody, that I’d had enough that evening, but they kept pushing and said I had to pick someone. They kept insisting and I did feel like it was who I was, like it was something I had to do, like I couldn’t escape them or my slutty self. So I picked the cutest guy there, who I also figured wouldn’t do anything because his girlfriend was with him. But he sent his girlfriend home.

He took me in the bedroom and closed the door, made me strip off all my clothes. I was kind of a sex robot. I lay beneath him and tried to do my job of making noises, but he put his hand over my mouth. I don’t remember what the sex felt like, really, just remember scrambling around after my clothes because he left the door open after so anyone could see in.

I did get most of my clothes on but after that I couldn’t really move and I started throwing up everywhere. I passed out and when I came to, everyone was hitting me, atleast 5 people including one girl, with what turned out to have been tennis rackets, blows coming down everywhere in the pitch black and I still couldn’t move. They were all calling me names, yelling at me for throwing up, telling me I was a stupid slut and in between saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” I was screaming my head off so that some blessed person heard and called the cops. Otherwise, those might have been my last moment on earth.

The next thing I remember was seeing my bloody face in the bathroom mirror, the girl who’d been helping to beat me up was making soothing sounds and cleaning me up. My favorite shirt (a bright mod swirly thing in the manner of De-Lite front woman and my style-hero, Lady Miss Kier) was spattered with blood.

As the police put us in a circle and questioned us, it dawned on me that my best friend had been in the front room, all of this time, standing by while those things happened, that she had let it happen.

I refused, no matter how many times they asked, to tell the police or anyone the sex part of the story. In no way did I think it wasn’t my fault for being drunk and slutty. I’d never seen The Accused, but I’d seen a review of it on Siskel & Ebert and I knew well enough who the accused would be. The not-telling is the part I feel most horribly ashamed about, the guiltiest. Some of them did go to jail for what happened, including the guy, but not for rape. I’m very, very sorry for not having done what I could to try and protect other women from that experience; I wish I could go back and do the right thing.

The following weeks were a family nightmare. My mom, horrified that I’d chosen to dye my hair the same purple as the bruises beneath my eyes, upset that it made her look like a bad mother, held my head over the tub and tried to bleach it out with Clorox. In the culmination of a fight with my mom, my dad pushed me down to the floor a week after the incident, kicked me and punched me, called me the same names the other people had and blamed me for bringing this violence into our family, though of course it had always been there. He pushed my mother down the stairs and the next day, she had bruises to match my own.

A newish friend, an artsy dykey girl I totally had a crush on, came and rescued me that night, but there wasn’t anyplace safe to be until I was shipped off for a few weeks that summer to my Catholic aunt’s house in the Maryland countryside, which had always been my favorite place in the world. I learned how to make homemade pop-tarts and fell in love with a boy from her church, who’s as gay as the day is long, but that didn’t stop us from kissing in the waves and whispering sweet nothings with the wild ponies of Chincoteague island. I took comfort in his innocence and it took me through that horrible year, but the wall of refusal and dread inside me was otherwise insurmountable. I’d already been a damaged girl, but now I was very often nothing but fight.

Holy Christmas, I Gave Somebody Advice!

Over the weekend, I got to be extremely proud of myself when a friend and reader I love and admire asked me for advice. The relationship issues she shared went along with a lot of the themes I obsess about here, so I thought my response to her was worth sharing. I was shocked to find myself sure of what to tell her, but if you ever need the strength to leave someone, I might be the girl to ask; it felt like I was also writing the letter to myself.

"Okay. Rereading your letter this morning made me really sure of what I want to say.

First, as much as I’ve tried to be open minded about people’s fantasy lives, I completely agree with you about his rape fantasy. I think it represents an unhealthy desire to be disconnected during what is supposed to be the most connected of times. Aside from what it says about his view of your personhood (and his own) I don’t see any potential in that kind of scene to bring you two closer. But all of that is moot, really, because you don’t want to do it. To me, that is the most powerful and valid of reasons not to do something, sexwise. Your wants and preferences are important, especially when it comes to something that has such a high physical and emotional risk factor.

And the part of you that’s not getting fulfilled? The sexy part? It’s important, vital, lovable, and (I think) divine. It’s life itself, the force that moves the universe. You deserve to feel it, to express it in whatever way feels good to you. Anybody who doesn’t want to love and honor and DEVOUR that part of you is absolutely not worth your time.

And your counselor is right: you can’t change him. For the part 12 years, I had very similar pains and frustrations with (Sweetie), I spent so many years BEGGING her to get her teeth fixed, to take care of herself, to get out of the job that was rotting her soul, etc. You wouldn’t believe the RELIEF that came when I realized I didn’t have to do that anymore, that I’m no longer responsible for her, that I never have to make her into someone I can stand to live with. I’m so grateful that I never, EVER have to nag her about anything ever again and I thank heavens every day that those are no longer my teeth to worry about.

A bad relationship can make you blind to the things that make you lovable, can make you feel like you can’t have or don’t deserve an escape route. But you can and you do. You are brilliant, powerful, tenacious, and loving and (if you don’t mind me saying) one of the most desirable people I’ve ever met. (Pause to take the sexTARDIS back to 2001 and leap upon you and yours…) It might not look this way now, but I could not be more sure that, after however much alone time you want, you could have absolutely ANYONE your heart desires.

To egalitarian-minded girls like ourselves it might to be hard to admit this, but it’s true: the world is full of people who are not good enough for us. He isn’t. He might be for someone, some day, but not for you, not now.

So take the alone time you want. Try to get inside yourself and see how brave and loving and worthy you are. Don’t dismiss your sex drive as unimportant; it’s there for a reason, and it deserves to be celebrated and appreciated.

There’s happiness and sex and joy ALL OVER THE PLACE waiting for you, and no matter what you decide, I’m here ready to send you all the gold stars.

Love,

(Me)"

A Bittersweet Breakthrough “No”

I was over the moon. It was finally going to happen. Cute Master and Pretty Slave were

planning to come over Saturday night for dinner and a playdate and he was excited to be my (at long last) first ass guy. I’m super tired of that storyline, but because this quest is riddled with a Three’s Company level of misunderstandings and pratfalls, a six-letter word had to get in the way.

Day after yesterday, he was sending me a series of exuberantly smutty texts about how hard he was going to fuck me, and I was getting happier and happier. Turned on and glowing, I wrote their names on the calendar and added a cute little Snoopy sticker marked “sleepover.” And then he said this:

“I’m going to make you cum from raping your ass.”

*record scratch…*

What…huh? Raping? I thought we were friends? Doing this together for…fun?

We had a nice text-conversation about why not to use that word, but really, should this really be a thing I have to tell people not to say? What kind of a WORLD is this? I didn’t want to call off the plan but the trigger was triggered and…I just couldn’t. It hurt my heart to say no to a fun night with favorite pals, but I did. I don’t really know what it means for our friendship and I’m really hoping that Pretty Slave isn’t mad at me. But even if she is, I know I did the right thing.

It’s not that using the word in a sext means he’s likely to do it, in spite of rumored allegations to that effect, my body’s always felt mostly safe with him. It just represents a worldview that I just can’t be okay with. To me, using that word meant that we wouldn’t really be in it together, that one of us would get to be a person and the other one, just a thing. I don’t think that was his intention in saying it, but it’s the feeling I got.

I’ve always felt out of sync with the way people joke about rape and throw the word around, like it’s nothing, like it isn’t a deep horror. This is why watching a Seth MacFarlane movie feels more transgressive to me than, say, getting set on fire. To me, lighthearted use of the word "rape" feels contemptuous not just to rape victims, but to humanity in general. It’s a vicious and untenable thing that feels impossible to fight, pervasive as weather.

Because this attitude that the word “rape” is no big deal is so pervasive and rape culture is so much the norm and on the surface in my local BDSM community, I’ve tried to adapt and make peace with it. Because being a rape victim has caused me to overbuild my defenses, I’ve tried to be a little bit less dogmatic about how people speak and act when it comes to matters of consent. There’s the dungeon owner I really like but who regularly dispenses the advice “Don’t go over to someone’s house unless you are ready to have sex with him.” as if driving over there is somehow an implied yes. There’s the way even some of my favorite kinksters often dismiss rape accusations as “drama.” And of course there’s the Scary Party staff treating its patrons like an all-you-can-take-advantage-of buffet. None of it is okay at all but I’ve played happily right in the middle of it for a couple of years. So what does that say about me?

It’s complicated because parts of my inner fantasy life isn’t super-consensual, but I guess what I’m realizing is that that doesn’t mean that I have to accept a guy for whom rape is part of the fantasy. The idea of sexytimes in which one of the people isn’t enjoying it makes me sick, and I don’t want a partner who’s turned on by that, even as a casual playpal.

From a vanilla standpoint, most of this seems like, yeah, duh, but it has been a boundary that is surprisingly hard from me to draw. I have had this semiconscious compulsion for a couple of years that rape culture is something I need to accept, something I need to compromise with in order to move forward. Because hating it sends me to such a dark place, I thought it would be better to love and accept it, and I have loved a few embodiments of it (though this is not that) but it doesn’t make me any less dark. It tunnels the darkness down to a pinpoint and makes me blind to everything else.

I’ve sometimes grabbed myself by the metaphorical hair and shoved myself into unsafe situations because if I could learn to love the dark things that have happened to me, if I could desensitize myself and not wince at little everyday cruelties, I could somehow reclaim the dignity I’ve lost. If I could love it, then I could make it my fault somehow and just say I’m sorry and move on. But I can’t get the dignity back, I can only hold onto what I have now, which is a choice every time somebody gets in my space.

All of this is a lot to get from one hapless and essentially harmless text, but I’m exhilarated by the breakthrough of it. Saying no to him because he used that word, even though it breaks my heart and makes my ass mad at me, means that I’ve stopped trying to compromise about this. The only rape I have to accept is what’s already happened to me. There’s never going to be a way to swoop in and save myself from the past, but I can do it in little calm ways every day in the present.

When I’m triggered, there’s a little voice in me that says I’m worthless, that if I say no to this person who made me feel yucky then I’ll never learn to be part of the world and I’ll never be loved, that I’ll never go to a party or have any friends. The little voice says no one will want me unless I can be exactly what they want, which sometimes means being nothing. As my readers well know, that voice has stopped me from taking care of myself too many times. I’m glad I was able to slow myself down this time, to see a choice instead of a catastrophe.

Today I kicked the bad little voice’s ass and closed the door on a whole set of compromises that I just don’t want to try and force myself to make anymore. Once the fear simmers down and the horizon widens out again, I think the world will look a whole lot brighter and freer. Welcome to me just not liking the stuff I don’t like. Personhood, huzzah.

Roadblock # 7: Why I Am Afraid of Young People

“Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world.” –Wilco

“Your pussy doesn’t care about your politics.” –Mollena Williams

***Note: As soon as I finished sitting in a diner and writing this post in my notebook, I went to an eye doctor appointment where I got totally asked out by a really excellent 28-year-old. He may be scrolling through at this moment and realizing he bit off more than her could chew, but still, if that’s not incentive to kick down this roadblock, I don’t know what is. As if the Steampunks and all of my other younger pals weren’t incentive enough!***

Amusing as it was, my foray back into the world of OK Cupid ended up being kind of triggering. It gave me kind of a trapped feeling—I’m sure that was partly because I’m not ready for dating, and also there’s something I don’t like about online sexting, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, it was fun at first to indulge in some non-goal-oriented flirting. I wound in an amusing game of Truth or Dare with a twenty-something guy and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that until he revealed, about eight messages in, that he has a rape fantasy. That in itself was not enough reason to stop the conversation—lord knows my fantasy life isn’t chock full of consent, so I feel like I have kind of a double standard being bothered by it.

But really, WHY is it okay to say the word rape to a girl you’re trying to get somewhere with? I didn’t ask him that, just moved the conversation on to other things, but I felt icky about him so I said a nice goodbye. He was kind of a snot about it, so I guess I made the right choice to cut him off. It was a fine afternoon’s entertainment, but it also inspired me to try and tackle this topic that I’ve stopped and started writing about so many times.

People who are in their twenties spent their entire formative years in a culture where rape jokes are part of the mainstream. Sarah Silverman (who I love, but who definitely adorabled rape jokes into okayness) and Seth McFarlane (who I think I would punch in the face if I could) both came along at the same time Buffy was getting sexually assaulted by Spike, and I really freaked out about it being taken so lightly. After a while, though, it became so normal that I, like most people, just kind of stopped fighting it.

Last spring, I was standing outside work at dismissal time and I heard some sixth grade girls joking about how their guy friends were trying to rape them. I put on the teacher voice and said, “Girls, I know you’re just kidding, but that is a very serious thing so please don’t joke about it.”

“It’s not serious to us!” They said, and went back to laughing and roughhousing.

There are studies that have shown that the definition of consent is eroding, and umpteen million books and articles have been written connecting those changes to the advent internet porn. I definitely don’t feel comfortable making blanket statements about porn’s relationship to real-world consent. I use it myself, about once a week, and not nice feminist porn either. I just troll through YouPorn like anybody else. I actually think it’s helped me to figure out some things that I would like to have happened to me, and in the years before I found the courage to date men, it gave me a safe way to experiment. Like any other porn user, sometimes it gives me ideas I want to use (I am a girl who genuinely likes to be come all over) and lets me experience things that would be terrifying in real life. (I probably wouldn’t like to be come all over by 100 guys.)

I don’t feel ashamed of using porn and I don’t think men should either, but at the same time, I did enjoy the time before guys wanted to choke me. Whitney Cummings has a great joke about that:

And I miss the time before guys would mention rape and expect to get somewhere with me. There are very good things about taboos being more out in the open, but dating just seems too harsh sometimes. I don’t know how much of the harshness I’m perceiving has to do with my own fears and past traumas (and Sweetie’s Rape Crisis Center view of men) and how much of it is actual sociological change.

I know my fear of young people fed into my fear of the Scary Party, (it’s the younger-skewing of the two main dungeons in town) even before the thing with The Man. I felt judged and sexualized there. It was just a fear and it was no doubt made worse by the fact that I was trying not to realize I would much rather play with men than with Sweetie, but it was a sensation like the bad, exploitive aspects of porn. I felt defined by the male gaze in a very unfun way. It was a terrible, desperate feeling that the only way to be worthy was to attract that gaze, and the only way to attract it was to fit into a very narrow set of criteria. If I wasn’t young, small, pliable, childlike, and deeply masochistic, then I was nothing at all.

A lot of that impression is about broken aspects of my psyche just finding expression out in the world. I have referred to it as the Cabinet in Which I Store My Fears. Some of the badness was something I was projecting, but not all of it.

Part of my fear of young people, if not most of it, comes from a sort of arrested development feeling that I’ve carried around since I was seventeen. I still have a general suspicion that I might be conspired against, rufied, raped, beaten and berated by mean kids just because ithappened that time when I was a kid. Now that I am shrugging off (blinking off?) that victim lens, I am hoping I will find fewer ways to end up expressing it out in the world.

I know it’s a skewed lens because many of the dearest people I know, including one of my protectors, belong to that generation I get scared of. I know they have nothing but goodness in their souls and no intention of hurting anybody who doesn’t want to be hurt. Just like I think the TNGers' age cutoff of 35 is mean and arbitrary, so is making assumptions about people under 30. The best solution to dismantling the arbitrary limits I’ve placed on myself and others is giving everyone a chance, getting to know them one-on-one, and continuing to say good nos, parsing out which scary things are within and which are without.

There’s a lot to be said too about my own anxieties about aging, but I’ll save that for another day.

Roadblock #1: Mom Was a Harpy, Dad Was Kind of a Rapist

Now that I’ve ended up crying on three separate second dates, I think it’s time to look more in depth at the things that keep me from feeling the base-level confidence that other women carry into their sex lives with men. I want to excavate and exorcize the ideas and images that sometimes hold me back from wholeheartedly and trustingly enjoying men in general and PIV sex in particular. I feel a little apologetic about this line of thought since I’d rather just be writing hotness, but hopefully self-examination will lead to more hotness.

My parents fought loudly and constantly on every topic. One night on a long car ride home, I woke to hear them having a way-too-intense discussion on the subject of the Designated Hitter Rule. They fought every year on the day we went to get the Christmas tree. They fought when my friends were sleeping over. But on no subject were they as loud, articulate and traumatic than as they were on the topic of sex.

Before I even really knew what sex WAS, I knew what it sounded like to be a woman who was deeply and bitterly frustrated by her sex life. I believe that my mom had the same hotpants tendencies that I have, but she hated that desire and never found a way to enjoy it or take ownership of it. In recent ill-fated discussions of my sex life, she’s suggested that I just ignore and wait out my attraction to men, with the bone-chilling advice that once I reach menopause, I just won’t care anymore. This does not make me feel less urgent.

As a kid, I was awoken many nights by her screaming indignantly about his inability to get her off. That this was my introduction to the concept of the orgasm makes it seem miraculous that I ever would’ve gotten so good at them. From the fights it seemed like his desire was lower than hers, too—some of the fights started by her trying to initiate something (“I got ready” she’d say, meaning she’d put in her diaphragm, which usually resided on the side of the family bathtub, a monument to her complete lack of boundaries.) only to be rejected. And then they fought, about how ineffectual he was, about how he didn’t love or want her. Because the fights often turned violent, I developed a hypervigilance and protectiveness toward her, even though she ran me down as constantly as she picked at him. (And, in fairness, he treated me with the same emotional distance and rejection as he did her.)

I was probably ten when I was being forced to have this over-awareness of their sex-life, and one night in particular stands out. I’ve talked about it a little here before but I think I need to go into it a little more deeply.

I awoke to hear them having sex. I guess she pulled away midsex because she said, in the most contemptuous voice possible “See? This is what it feels like when someone stops before you’re finished.” Her voice sounded so deeply spiteful and ugly, but in no way did it excuse what happened next.

There were sounds of struggle and she said “NO! NO! Stop! (his name)!”

I knew something really bad was happening and so I started to cry as loudly as I could. The struggling sounds stopped and she said “See, now you’ve made (my name) cry.”

The fight boiled down but the damage was done and I was somehow creepily part of it.

I asked her about this incident during their divorce proceedings a few years later and she says he never raped her. Given my own complicated relationship with sex and struggle I could see how she might see that as true, but I know that after that night, part of me gave up on the world. It seemed too dark and hopeless, and there seemed to be too much threat and danger, especially in male-female partnerships.

Part of me has trouble not identifying with my mother, with the anger and ugliness of her unmet desires, or rather the ugliness of how she blamed everyone for them including me. It’s hard not to feel guilty for loving my dad, given his general abusiveness and the callous brutishness and selfishness of his response to her bad games. It’s been such a long struggle to mentally separate my own sex experiences from those of my parents. It’s hard to see my own urgency as normal and natural, to see men as the sensitive caring humans they most assuredly are, to see PIV sex as something that isn’t inherently humiliation. Even after all these years and all these adventures, I still have to learn that I am not bad for wanting it.

I am so ashamed of that night, for being part of it, part of them. I’m ashamed for the times I’ve been like her and treated partners in less-than-humane ways, for being like him and acting selfish and callow sometimes.

But it’s way past time to realize that I’m not them. Like her, I was born more desirous and aggressive than a woman is expected to be, but I’ve tried to make myself responsible for my own satisfaction. It’s not really me who feels guilty for wanting to climb all over men, it’s my mother, and I am not my mother. I have the advantage of having been born in a more liberated era, and while I am proud of trying to make the most of the tools and advantages I have, I feel compassion for her sex drive being thwarted and unloved for a great deal of her adult life. It doubles my commitment to loving it in myself.

I’m not sure how I’ve lived all these years with a rapist for a dad, how I’ve spent all these years loving him. In that one moment of desperation, hate, and anger he squashed a beautiful part of me that has been so, so hard to get back—the belief that sex with a man can be loving, or fun, or empowering or even (gasp!) all of the above. It’s hard to trust that if I say what I need, I won’t be punished for it.  It’s hard to believe that I am not as dark and broken and unlovable as that memory. That’s what I’m working on here, and I’m so grateful to have the chance.

Cuddle Party Part Five: Puppy Pile and My Excellent “No!”

Some days, I am so ready to be finished being a project. I’m frustrated with all things involving protocols, yesses and nos, contracts, everything that’s between me and just running into someone’s arms with abandon. I am impatient for whatever/whomever comes next, for just muddling through intimacy on a case-by-case basis. The tools I’m learning are useful, but everything feels like it is at such a remove lately. Cuddle Parties, BDSM, even the relentless communication-perfectionism of poly culture, they all seem like ways to guard one’s heart, to keep anyone from getting in there and fucking shit up, to keep anything genuinely serendipitous and messy and personal and awesome from happening.

What I’m really impatient with, of course, is the way that I keep MYSELF guarded, but as antsy as I am I’m still too scared to open up the way I want to. I guess it’ll happen when it happens.

That being said, if I’m getting to be ready for something real, the cuddle party helped to get me there. Though it didn’t feel sexy to be there, it did feel wonderful. The best part was when I stretched out on a pillow and pay back by myself, near the crowd but apart from them—a warm, happy, floating sensation of self-sufficiency, of self-love. It’s the same feeling I get sometimes when I’ve been swimming for a while and I let myself just float on my back in the ocean and look up at the blue sky and clouds. From above, a tall, grey haired man asked me to cuddle with him, and I blissfully said “No, I’m being by myself right now.”

From behind me, I heard Sheandhim, who hadn’t moved from her four-person cuddle pile for hours, clarify helpfully and protectively: “That was a no.”

From my floaty spot, I could see that some pretty dancing had started. The Lady of the Hose, the Hosts, and Massage Therapist Man were dancing above the cuddle, moving their hands in front of them in pretty shapes not unlike the shapes I used to make with glow sticks in my raver days. It looked fun, and after a while, I joined in. I danced or sat meditatively (the Lady of the House always seemed to be nearby, but also very happily contained—it was comforting) for most of the rest of the party, until it was time for the “puppy pile.”

I surprised myself by agreeing to be at the bottom of the puppy pile. It came close to the “smushed” idea, I guess. Those of us on the bottom of the pile lay down in a row and the top layer folks lay down over us, perpendicularly. Host One was one of the people right on top of me, that was fine. One of the not-careful-with-space guys was down toward my feet. I was a little scared, but I like trust games, so this felt okay.

I was pinned down for a few minutes and it felt fine, giggly. Then someone decided to TICKLE MY FEET! Without having asked! “No! No to tickling!” I yelled. I was conscious of the fact that I had disturbed the mellow loveyness, but for once I didn’t worry that I had been a bad girl. It wasn’t a timid or apologetic or halfhearted no, it was big, powerful, and blustery. It was a beautiful “no” and it makes me think I’m ready to graduate from something. Here, at least, is a gold star.

Is there any worse way to non-consensually touch someone who is pinned down than tickling?! What kind of a creepwad would do that? It seems like it would particularly loaded for anyone, but I know it is for me. I guess I’ll have to get around to writing the not-hot post entitled “The Land of the Questionable Babysitters” sometime soon.

Having said my no, I calmed back down again, until I felt, close to my ankle, a little twitch. A change of shape. I recognized this as the feeling of the perfectly innocent erection of somebody I didn’t know. I was done. I had to get up right then. I calmly but urgently asked to be let out and the puppy pile disbanded.

At the end of the party, I said a few goodbyes and called Sweetie to see if she was on the way. She was. I changed into my blue polka-dot summer dress—most of my dresses are so soft that they could double as pajamas. I packed up my PJs and slippers in my suitcase and went to wait for Sweetie outside. It was dark out, but I wasn’t scared. I noticed that the people who lived in the development across the street had really big TVs. It was so dark that I couldn’t even see the color of my car as it pulled up. I’m always so happy to see Sweetie after adventures. We stopped at the Wawa for snacks and then drove home listening to our pop-culture podcasts. We were on the way home, and I felt proud and satisfied.

Cuddle Party Part Four: Space, Reiki, and Wrestling

I think I did a really good job during free cuddling, even as I was reticent to join the general smush. After a too-hurty try at a massage by a very friendly guy, I was sitting in my own little pleasant bubble of space when the husband of the couple I already knew (I’ll call them SheandHim and HimandHer because they are quite inseparable) offered me a foot rub and that sounded joust right. He compared himself to the previous massage-giver: “He’s all force and I’m all energy.”

I stretched my feet out in front of me and he took off my fuzzy slippers (which I’d bought just for the occasion) and started to rub my feet gently. Curious what he meant to be doing with the energy (I keep fighting the urge to be ironic and put energy in quotation marks) I asked “Are you taking something out or putting something in?”

And he said “Which does it feel like?”

“Both?”

What it felt like was good, like a regular foot rub except that it gave my toes a floating sensation, kind of like during yoga when you are supposed to breathe through the soles of your feet—an improbable sensation, grounding and pleasant. He was explaining to me about the energy, buy I couldn’t really keep track of what I was supposed to be learning, there was too much going on around me.

Toward the end of the foot rub, The Lady of the House came over and asked if she could lie near me, and I said of course. I forget if she asked me or if I asked her if I could pet her hair, but it was a yes. I petted her head and face until it started to feel too personal, then did a good job of stopping. She thanked me and maybe we hugged some—I know that at some point we hugged and at some point HimandHer asked if he could put his head in my lap and I said no.

Whenever I said no to something, I remembered to feel proud of doing a good job with my no, but I also rooted for the person to find exactly what he or she wanted. Also, writing about all these nos  and cautious touches makes me really ready for a whole bunch of rough-and-tumble yesses—better get some public (and private) kink soon!

One of my goals for this party had been to get closer to men, but that didn’t turn out to be what happened. I think maybe the right guy just wasn’t there, as is so often the case—I’m making friends with the fact that I’m really picky about guys, even as I hope to someday become less so. (Also I have this dream about being 40% more casual than I actually am, but that’s a whole different blog post.)

I spent a lot of time watching, maybe too much—I wish that I had asked what the watching protocol is. In BDSM, the closer you are, the less you should watch, for fear of getting in somebody’s space too much, but here, everyone was close. I worry that I may have made people feel awkward by watching, but they were all just having such a pleasant time.

Host One had told us during the welcome circle that she is a Reiki practitioner, and I was curious about that, so I asked her if she could “put some Reiki on me” (I don’t know the terminology) when she got to a good stopping point, and she said sure.

I found a spot to lie down (I chose face up) and handed her my glasses to put in a safe place. (Ah, the handing over of glasses, dear submissive trope, how I miss you!) She moved her hands up and down my body, without touching. (I joked to Sweetie yesterday that some of this energy work stuff feels like a kids’ game of “I’m not touching you!”) but the settled one hand on my head and one on my heart, very similar to the way Fireguy had held me down during fireplay. Here I’m quite sure that it wasn’t meant as a dominant gesture (or maybe Fireguy meant it as a Reiki gesture), but I liked that it reminded me of that feeling, but with mystic-hot hands instead of flame-hot ones, and also with pajamas on. Her hands were indeed radiating into me, and I thought jeez, how does she give out so much of her…life force? and still have enough for herself. It was so nice of her, so generous, and I felt a little guilty because I didn’t know how to reciprocate. (That’s a little echo of the times I’ve been pleasantly dominated and then left with a worry of not having behaved well enough, not having shown enough gratitude. Gratitude is such a tricky thing, probably another whole-other-blog-post.)

A commotion started at the other end of the room, and I had to keep lifting my pleasantly-held-down head to see what was going on. What I saw was a tangled loop of muscle and giggle.

“What?! There’s wrestling going on and I’m not in it?”

I thanked my Reiki friend and sat up to watch and see if I could join the wrestling. Host Two, The Lady of the House, and Massage Therapist Guy were all gleefully in mid-grapple, and when they simmered down, I asked Host Two if she would wrestle with me. She said yes and asked if she could run energy at the same time, and I said “I don’t know what that means, but sure!”

It was pretty much the most fun ever. I think people really liked watching it, too. Pushing against her arms, locking against her shoulders, hearing a couple of people hollering “Go (me)!” until I pressed hard enough to pin her down, then getting up and wrestling her down again, laughing hysterically the whole time. We ended the wrestle out of breath and giggling, I was stunned with joy, it was fantastic. Rough cuddling indeed. There really needs to be more wrestling in my life, hope Sweetie’s ready for it!

Next: The Puppy Pile 

Cuddle Party Part Three: A Very Chaste Threesome

Writing about this particular adventure made me notice a contradiction I’ve got going—how does my desire for lots of respectful elbow-room jibe with my desire to be mauled and ravished? In the years where I thought about men but didn’t do anything about it, my fantasy was always to have a guy who’d push me, take me, ravish me, to not be able to put up all the barriers I am usually inclined to put up. (but all in the spirit of friendship and fun) I’ll probably always love Bill for fulfilling most of that fantasy, but I didn’t realize until later just how dangerous it had been.

But still, there was a daredevil purity to what he and I were doing—no negotiating, very few spoken limits, often getting pushed past no—it felt good, it was a relief at first, to be free of the way I’ve mostly held passion at arm’s length. Even after all these months I still can’t square the gleeful, nasty pleasure of that relationship with the way that it plunged me into blackness, made me totally hate myself. Part of it was that every time I truly go into sub-space, it dredges up issues from my subconscious, but I know that darkness came from actual real-time him as well.

I’ll never get to be devoured like that again, because I’ll always have to take care to have a voice, to communicate. There’s no such thing as just being able to abdicate all of my power to someone, and I am honestly a little disappointed about that. But to really love and be loved (and ravish and be ravished) I have to create some inner structural integrity, a fidelity to myself. So that’s what we’re working on here.

When it came to the part of the welcome circle where we were to join two other people and negotiate a cuddle, I was delighted with who I got triaded up with—just the two that I would have chosen: The Lady of the House and Massage Therapist Man. Two of the prettiest people in the room. We had eight minutes to both negotiate and cuddle. First, we had to take turns saying what we wanted. They looked at me to go first (I like to go first, it helps me listen better) but I was suddenly speechless. I didn’t have the words for what I wanted to ask for. The LOTH said that she wanted to be hugged and held, and MSM said that he wanted to make a “heart circle.” I had to ask what that means and he said that’s when you put your hands on each others’ hearts and run energy between them. That sounded nice. I still equivocated and couldn’t quite get to what I wanted—“smushed” was the closest I could get. I said that I usually want to be rougher than seems appropriate for a cuddle party, and thus the phrase “rough cuddling” was born.

LOTH said that the heart thing sounded best to her, and I agreed, so that’s what we started with. I welcomed the chance to physically experience loving male and female energy at the same time—that’s a goal I’ve been inching glacially towards for a long time.

It takes a lot of trust to put your hand on a near-stranger’s heart. For each stage of the hand-placing, we had to ask “”May I put my hand on your heart?” “May I put my hand on your hand?” and so on. We sat like that and breathed and sort of circle-swayed, MTM making breathy yummy noises. I didn’t feel any jolt of energy running through us, but sitting with them that way felt so soothing. I was I was able to lose myself a little in the circuit of us, until time was called. Then it was time for free cuddling.

Next Time: A Foot Rub, Some nice Reiki, and! Wrestling!

Cuddle Party Part Two: I Heart Practicing My “No.”

Before I go back into the Cuddle Party, I just wanted to celebrate the rules a little bit in a different way. As I’ve mentioned, I am training to be an elementary school teacher, and one of the things I’ve worried about the most is the amount that kids always want to be touching—it’s cute and endearing, but it can add up to being too much for me. I’ve given a lot of thought to ways in which I could carve out some space for myself in the classroom, so a few weeks ago, I tried a little experiment—I told my students to ask for hugs. We even practiced it. I said “When you’d like a hug, please say “Would you like a hug?” to me. I might say no, and that doesn’t mean you’re bad or I don’t like you, it just means that I’m not feeling huggy.” I tried this with first graders, and they took to it right away. This is a HUGE load off my mind—if I can create a friendly, open classroom AND have space for myself, it will be so awesome.

Anyway, back to the Cuddle Party. When it was almost time for the welcome circle, I went upstairs to get into my PJs, and ran into Cuddle Host Two, whom I hadn’t met before. She stopped for a mircrosecond to ask if she could hug me, and I said sure. She’s a fit, long-haired hippie-ish woman about my age, maybe a little younger. She had such a smile on her face and a glow in her cheeks-she looked like a Tantric pin-up girl, all bright eyes and flowy clothes. She complimented my PJs.

Before the welcome circle, we heard the Lady of the House, a beautiful, slight-but-strong African American woman (and owner of all the bi-friendly books, maybe) playing the harmonium and singing a song whose melody was “Om Shanti.” We all sang along. I Googled “Om Shanti”  and found out that it means “peace,” and that Shanti repeated three times represents the “threefold peace in body, speech and mind.” (http://www.wildmind.org/mantras/figures/shanti)

As I said in the last post, almost everyone had been in Tantric workshops all day. You could tell who was new by who wasn’t sensitive about space—I noticed that a couple of the new guys took up more space than others did, and felt free to touch without permission. It was a good opportunity to practice not seeing them as a threat, and being able to make space for myself.

The first exercise we were to do in the welcome circle was to practice our “no.” A few weeks go, in Tantric poetry class (I really like sentences that start that way) we were practicing our yesses and nos and my yesses sounded great, loud and full and a little defiant, but my nos rang a little false and hollow. The going wisdom is that your yes can’t mean anything until you have your no down, so I was glad to get a chance to practice.

“Turn to your left and ask that person if you can kiss him or her. The gender doesn’t matter. That person’s job is to say “no.” Practice this three times.”

The guy next to me was adorable enough; he looked like he had been sent from central casting. In fact, he was a massage therapist and training to host cuddle parties. He was young, sleekly muscled, and bright-eyed, with a receding blond halo of close-cropped hair. Too virtuous and clean-cut for me, so when he asked, “May I kiss you?” it was easy to say “No.” Easy to say it, but not so easy not to fill the awkward space after it with nervous quipping. We did a great job with that exercise and he accepted a high-five. There was lots more no-saying practice, with different partners offering any number of things—I had a real hard time saying no when the Lady of the House said:

“May I spank you with that copy of the Divine Androgyne?”

I really hoped that one would come back around after no-practice was over.

That offer aside, it should be apparent at this point that Cuddle Parties are not sexy, at least this one wasn’t. They are a way to make connections, yes, even in a divine way sometimes, but they are more of a way to create and practice your boundaries. Anything that happens should not just be a “yes,” but a “hell yes!”—some of us who grew up abused don’t know how to make boundaries, we feel guilty making space for ourselves. That’s one of the things I enjoy about BDSM play parties—both within scenes and during downtime, I can feel about twelve feet of caution-tape safe space around me, and it’s up to me to decide who comes inside it—that’s very powerful. Like play parties, Cuddle Parties are a wonderful way to practice feeling safe around bodies in general.

Next: A Very Chaste Threesome

Cuddle Party Part One: Yay, a Lot Less Grief!

I am so excited and happy to have a new adventure to write about. Before I start, I thought I’d share the cuddle party rules, copied from www.cuddleparty.com:

“ARRIVE ON TIME: Once we begin the Welcome Circle and orientation, sorry, we can let no one enter late. This creates comfort and safety by knowing that everyone is on the same page about rules and expectations.

WHAT TO WEAR: Pajamas – nothing too risqué. Think more comfy than sexy. (More drawstrings, less lace! No shorts.)

WHAT TO BRING: Sorry, no liquor folks. Juice or sparkling cider is always welcome. A pillow or stuffed animal if you like. Otherwise, just bring your smiling self.

STICK TO THE RULES:

1.                      Pajamas stay on the whole time.

2.                      You don’t have to cuddle anyone at a Cuddle Party, ever.

3.                      You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before you touch anyone. (Be as specific in your request as you can.)

4.                      If you’re a yes, say YES. If you’re a no, say NO.

5.                      If you’re a maybe, say NO.

6.                      You are encouraged to change your mind.

7.                      Respect your relationship agreements and communicate with your partner.

8.                      Get your Cuddle Party Facilitator or the Cuddle Assistant if you have a question or concern or need assistance with anything during the Cuddle Party.

9.                      Tears and laughter are both welcome.

10.                  Respect people’s privacy when sharing about Cuddle Parties.

11.                  Keep the Cuddle space tidy”

In order to capture what Saturday’s party was like for me, I need to backtrack a little to the Snuggle Party that I attended back in February. It was called a Snuggle Party because it didn’t follow all of the same rules, just most of them. It was a little more sex-friendly—women were allowed to strip down to their bras and sexy touching was encouraged. But all the neat stuff about yesses and nos were in place.

I attended the Snuggle Party as part of a fantastic conference day, one of the happiest days of my life, actually. I had spent the day feeling accepted and body-positive and had even had the most wonderful Indian food and gelato date with Sweetie. (She brought me gum so that I wouldn’t have too-spicy breath while snuggling—we know she’s awesome like that.)That was the day I started my tradition of getting fresh socks after every adventure—so soothing.

All of that wonderfulness aside, as soon as the welcome circle began, I got a terrible pain in my middle back. No matter how much I stretched or sat up straight or exhaled loudly, it huuuurt. I have a skeptical/aloof view about body energy, even though I experience it all the time, but this definitely felt like some terrible blocked energy. It began to radiate down from my back into my hips, and up into my shoulders. I went to the facilitator for help and she said the only way to stop the hurt was to stop dismissing my grief (over Bill, over all that time fighting being bi, about the hurt in my marriage, and so on), so I did—I cried a little to the snuggle facilitator and a lot to Sweetie on the way home. I call it a snuggle fail, but it really isn’t. That crying was so productive—it was kinda like handing in homework, and you know I love handing in homework.

Sweetie was overwhelmed and scared by the depth and breadth of my sobbing, but she did the best she could as we drove home. What I was crying about was, I felt like everyone there was so nice and someone bad like me could never belong with them, like I would only cause trouble with my bad energy. “You’re good enough,” Sweetie said over and over, “You’re good enough.” Scary as those tears were, I knew they were getting me somewhere.

Back to the present, on Saturday, Sweetie and I had had such a wonderful day together and I was settling into a book of Jonathan Franzen essays, so it was hard to pry ourselves out of the house. Like on so many other adventures, she’d offered to drive me and go to a coffeeshop nearby to work on her graphic design. (It occurs to me that it might be good to drive myself next adventure...) When we pulled up to the ashram, it was a somewhat foreboding house on a woodsy lane—spooky. Sweetie offered to see me in but I took my suitcase and kissed her goodbye, found my way to the back of the house and went in.

I saw one couple that I knew right away, that was comforting. It was hot in there, muggy and something else. There was a spread of snacks out in the kitchen that people had gathered around—this Cuddle Party was part of a weekend-long series of Tantra workshops, so people looked flushed and tired and seemed bonded. It didn’t look the way one might picture an ashram, just a regular pretty-big kitchen in a regular house. The body smell of everyone was less funky than one might expect—it was fresh. Not quite clean, but clear.

Cuddle Host One, a solid, sensible-seeming butch lady, came over and introduced herself. She gave me a waiver to sign. “This says you don’t hold us responsible if you have an emotional breakthrough.” Ok, noted. I felt aaaawkward and couldn’t find a surface to write on. I ended up ruining the email list by putting it down in some water. I didn’t really know where to put myself, either.

When I saw the room being set up for the Cuddle Party, my first instinct was to run. It seemed impossibly small for all of these people. Cuddle Host One was spreading out all kinds of blankets and pillows. I thought about adding my own blanket but didn’t want to have to pull it out from under anybody of I had to leave early. A cute fifty-ish man was asleep in front of the air conditioner. There was cute/radical Etsy-style art on the walls—that made me feel at home. There were lots of books on the shelves about being bi and sacred—how nice!

Comparing my body’s reaction to the Snuggle Party back in February and its reaction to this Cuddle Party really lets me know that I’ve gotten somewhere. Though there was awkwardness, there was no anxiety or pain. There were some guys who weren’t being careful with space, but I didn’t feel scared of them. I settled in and let my curiosity take over, knowing that Jonathan Franzen was there if I needed him, but letting myself be soft and present. There wasn’t pain in my center, but warmth—I wasn’t ready to let strangers hug me, but I was safe.

 

My teacher-brain suggests that I use Cuddle Parties as a quarterly assessment to see how far I’ve come towards inner safety and self-acceptance. I can’t always see the progress I’m making, but as I settled into that room of strangers the way one might settle into a warm bath, I could see I deserved a gold star.

Next: The Welcome Circle